


Bishop

by FearOrRegret



Category: Original Work
Genre: NaNoWriMo 2018
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-16 15:47:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16498448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FearOrRegret/pseuds/FearOrRegret
Summary: Day 1 - Here's the first chunk of writing I've done for my NaNoWriMo project this year. This isn't necessarily the beginning of the story. Each day I'll be writing whichever portion I have the inspiration for. Obviously these will be more rough draft than finished product. I'd love to get some feedback as I work. That would help keep me on course and decide which direction to steer the story. I'm going for something of a Sci-Fi/Western (like gunslingers but in space).Bishop is a young woman who was raised in a settlement on Mars. Her father was a wanted outlaw that found God and turned his life around, but she didn't know until he was killed by bounty hunters. Years later she's lost her faith and decides she's going to track down the man that killed her father.





	Bishop

The lake at the center of New Huntsville was man made. It took a team of architects and engineer a decade to design a body of water that looked like it belonged in the empty terrain. After that the terraforming crews worked for a year to make it a reality and four more years to make the water safe to drink. Bishop's grandfather bragged about building that lake and the city that spiraled out around it until his dying day. His wish was to have his ashes scattered across it, but the city wouldn't allow it for fear of contaminating their only source of fresh water. Instead they mixed his remains with the Martian dirt and planted a tree by the front gate of his property and watered it with lake water so that he would still be a part of it in some way. His was the last generation of her family to see the Earth in person. There were photo albums to peruse, a vibrant representation of what that other world was truly like, but she knew that photographs would never do it justice. Neither of her parents seemed to share her curiosity although they had both been born on Mars.

Her mother's family was among those who had abandoned the sinking cities on the Gulf Coast and, hoping for a chance to escape the poverty of life on a dying planet, settled on the newly conquered one with nothing but each other to depend on. She was the third of five children and the first born to their new home. Life on Mars was all she had ever known. Unlike her siblings, she had no desire to part with it. One by one, they found their way back to Earth, leaving her alone to inherit the farm as well as their reputation as one of the founding families of the New Huntsville lake. She maintained the farmland on her own, hiring help from the city during harvest season. Like her father before her, she was hearty and independent with work hardened hands that could be either firm or gentle as she needed them to be. She met the love of her life in the fall, married him in the spring, and welcomed her only daughter in the following winter.

In her life time, Bishop had never seen her father commit an act of violence against another living thing. Not a man, woman, animal, or lowly crawling beetle. She asked him once why he chose in the harsh wilderness that they lived in to travel the pacifist's path. The other men of New Huntsville were short tempered brutes that treated their kin with as much care as they did their adversaries. Why then should her father bare the brunt of their blunt abuse without any intention to retaliate?

She would not forget the day. It was mid-day on a Sunday so dry that the pastor had ended church service early for fear of the congregation growing dehydrated. She was sixteen, uncomfortable from the sun beating on her unshaded face and hot with the dreadful anticipation of returning to the school house on Monday. Side-by-side, she and her father rode home at a leisurely pace to avoid exhausting their horses. There was no livestock waiting at the farm to be tended to, and the crops would be watered with or without them, unless thieves had gotten into their water again.

Bishop could not say what the pastor had spoken about that Sunday. Whatever passages were recalled or scripture sighted was a mystery she would not solve. She had been distracted by what she'd heard as they had crossed the threshold of the church. Seated in the back pew nearest the door, as they always did, two of her classmates sat with their foreheads nearly touching murmuring all the gossip they could manage before the Lord's presence demanded that they behaved more respectfully. It was a gauntlet that Bishop walked every Sunday. Usually their criticism landed on the suspenders and pressed trousers that she wore each week. At her age, she had seen enough Sundays to withstand the abuse or her peers, but as she passed this time a new rebuke chased her down the aisle.

"Brave to keep coming to church every week."

As she settled into the pew beside her father (three rows back, not in the vanguard of the devout but far enough forward to be witnessed) the words, whispered just loud enough for her to hear in passing, repeated in her head. The doors closed and the pastor stood to greet them. They bowed their head in prayer. Loathsome as it was, she knew why the other girls would use her attire to make her a target of their scorn. But what reason would they have to believe that she did not belong at Sunday service? She said her prayers and observed her morals as well as any other. Who were they to pass judgment?

The choir was leading the first hymn--heavy and melancholy in the stifling building--by the time that she made her conclusion. The girls had not been talking about her but about her father. No doubt they had learned from their own patriarchs to disdain her family. Few men in town had a kind word for the man that raised her, and, it seemed, that tradition would carry over to the next generation.

"Why'd you let folks treat you the way they do?" she asked on their lengthy ride home. "You don't get mad ever?"

"I get mad plenty," he answered.

"But you don't wanna fight them old bastards?"

"Fighting don't ever fix nothing, baby. And don't let your mother hear you cursing like that."

"Bastard's not a curse. Not like ass."

"I don't believe in harming any of the Lord's work," he proceeded despite her disagreement. "Man or beast, we're all of us a part of God's creation both on Earth or on the red dust of Mars."

"On Earth," he told her, "they slaughter God's creatures in numbers unneeded to support their existence on that blue light. But let them live a week--or even a day--in the barrens of Mars, they'd learn quick that life's too precious to throw away like that."

"You never been on Earth."

Ten years had come and gone since that Sunday, and Bishop still believed her father to be the holiest man to ever grace New Huntsville. Never mind what the filthy bounty hunter, or the rotten judge that paid him, had told her the day he went to heaven. She may have strayed from the peaceable trail that he had planned for her future, but she would go to her grave happy knowing that the man that had put him down would be suffering in hell long before she joined him, the self-righteous dog.

She woke late on Sunday morning damp with sweat. The midday sun warmed her bedroom in spite of the thick dark curtains she had hung to keep the light out. The automated tinting had failed nearly a year ago. Curtains, she figured, were cheaper than having it fixed. After all, any of the specialists that were willing to come onto the estate charged twice what they did inside of the city. For the travel, they always told her. Not because they knew that she had no competitors to turn to, or course. Instead of permitting their robbery, she cut large pieces from a Sunday dress once reserved for Bible studies and social events and a carefully pressed wedding dress, the only two dresses her mother had ever owned, and fashioned them into drapes. The curtain rods she hung them from she had made by mounting pvc pipes above the windows. She succeeded in shutting out the light but not the heat.

Begrudgingly roused from her rest, she stripped off her sweaty nightshirt and donned a thin, sleeveless undershirt. Her hair, although disheveled from sleep and steadily coming loose, was still in the braid she had tied before going to bed. She untied it, raking the knots out with her fingers, and pulled it into a high bun to keep it off of her neck until she managed to cool down. Her mother, she recalled, could tie a braid so neat that it was hard to believe a human hand had made it and so tight that it would on occasion make her head ache. Looking in the mirror at the wisps of hair that fell persistently in her face Bishop wished she had taken the time to learn that technique.

Sundays always felt like the longest day of the week for her. Without the routine that used to rule them, she found herself with too much time on her hands each weekend. Riding into town for Sunday service would fill the time. It was a trip she had not made in nearly six years. In her time away from God she had taken up the arms that her father had told her he never believed in. The pistol that she bought she kept fully loaded with charges and stowed in her nightstand behind a lock that turned only in response to her touch. The rifle she let rest below the house in the same place that she had found it.

Finally relieved from the heat she had awoken to and following a modest breakfast, she pulled on a pair of ripped and faded trousers and gathered her most worn pair of boots. She combed her hair and braided it again. The braid she wrapped in a bun and pinned in place. Fly away hairs framed her face, and she sighed unable to recall how her mother had always told her to fix it. After dressing for her weekly practice, she returned to her bedroom for her pistol. She placed her palm against the cool surface of the nightstand and the drawer slid out to present her weapon to her. She holstered it, ensuring first that the safety was on, and grabbed her wide brimmed hat and rode out to the edge of the property where she practiced her shooting.


End file.
